Unsettling Revelations
by Surburia
Summary: The first time Gary doesn't live up to all Andy wants him to be. Rating warnings before story


**A/N Warning for language, drug use, self-harm, and mentions of suicide**

Gary sometimes can't account for his actions. There's an impulsive rage that builds up and drags inwards. The world goes dull, a low monotonous buzz of gray telly snow, and everything implodes. He's swearing, and with just a cursory look underneath the fingers that cradle his fist, he knows his knuckles are broken.

"Gary's been an arse all day," Oliver says.

"No set Friday plans, I know, but what you say we take Gary out and find something to cheer him up?" Steven says shouldering his bag. They're jostling they're way down the hallway in-between 2nd and 3rd period.

"Andy, what's up with him? He hasn't seemed himself the whole week," Peter says.

Andy shrugs. "No fucking clue."

It isn't true.

Gary's been sleeping at his place. The first night he thinks there's a burglar, the whole of the house seeming to rattle and clank, pulling him out of sleep with a sharp intake of breath, and then he realizes that it's coming from outside, and he opens his blind, grabbing the first thing off his nightstand for some form of protection, and there's Gary, his legs wrapped around the drain pipe, one hand anchoring himself to the window-sill, and the other raised mid-knock, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face when he sees Andy.

"Open the window, you lout." Andy hears muffled through the glass, and he crosses his arms, but even in the light he can see a deep purple bruise under Gary's left eye and in that grin a bit of blood, wet and ozzey against Gary's front teeth. He opens the window, and grabs ahold of his shoulders, the familiar feel of his black trench coat meeting his fingers and hauls his best mate in.

"Shit, Gary," he says, and then getting a better look at him, "Fucking shit, Gary, what happened?"

"Why are you holding a—what the hell is that?" Gary looms closer, balancing himself against the night stand.

And Andy realizes that he's grabbed the can of cheese whizz he'd left on his nightstand. "My weapon," he says.

"You were going to cheese me to death. Don't we get enough of that from good ol' Steve, and his proclamations of undying love for dear Sam?"

"Hard to know what to expect when someone ascends your drainpipe, isn't it?"

"Sounds nice. Love for someone to ascend my drainpipe."

"What the hell does that even mean?"

"Whatever I want it to mean, my dear Andy." He waggles an eyebrow.

Gary rubs a quick hand under his nose, and the closer that Andy looks at him the more he notices. His pupils are dialated, he's shaking, jiggling his leg. "You're going to have an aneurysm if you keep that up." He wants it to sound funny, and Gary laughs, a short bark of sound, but Andy only feels his stomach drop.

"What'd you take?"

"Nothing." He gives a few fast frenetic rubs to the corner of his eye. "The usual. Dad threw me out, went looking for a fight."

"Gary, what the hell were you thinking?"

"Wasn't," he says, his knee jiggling up and down. Andy feels the vibration when he sits down next to him. He looks to the base of the door, good still dark, his parents would sleep through anything with the amount of sleeping pills they take. Drugging yourself to stay awake, drugging yourself to fall asleep. Andy's starting to hate it.

"Thought, I'd stay here tonight."

"Yeah, yeah sure. Get out before they wake up though."

"Not a problem," Gary says.

"You going to school tomorrow?" Andy asks.

"Yeah, wouldn't want to miss seeing you lot. Nowhere else to go. They know my face in Newton Haven, hard to be truant when you're wanted by the law," he says like some sort of deluded outlaw.

Andy's afraid to ask it. He's thinks he might know. "Gary, that bruise..."

He let's it hang in the air, hoping maybe Gary will tell the truth.

"Shit licker from East Central. You should see him - breathing through a straw, I would think."

Andy looks at Gary's knuckles. They're unbruised. He can see old scabs, scars, but nothing fresh. He wants to touch Gary's hands, he wants to ghost his fingers across those old wounds, but he keeps his hand in his lap.

"Andy."

Andy leans closer, half hoping but knowing it's going to amount to nothing.

"I gotta piss," Gary says.

"Not in here you don't."

He heads for the door.

"Wait, wait, my parent's door is right down the hall."

"Yeah, Andy your Mom's a fox and all, but got other priorities right now."

"Ugh, Gary, no come on. Wait just a freakin moment." He grabs Gary's shoulder, regretting the action when he lets out a little hiss of pain and gently moves him towards the wall. "Just stay put a bloody moment."

Gary gives him a salute.

Andy tentatively twists the doorknob and peers out into the hall. His parent's door is shut, no light coming out from the thin crack underneath.

"Second door on the right, go, don't knock over the vase."

"I know where the bloody loo is , Andy," he stage whispers. "I practically live here."

He watches Gary open the door and close it behind him, then Andy steps back into his room, running his fingers through his hair.

"Supid fucking Gary," he 's whispering under his breath. It was all Gary's Dad, had to be. Either Gary'd gotten caught snorting some of his dad's coke and he'd decided to teach him a lesson, or something else had set him off and the cocaine was all together a separate factor.

Andy waits and waits, watching his clock. It's 4:00 in the fucking morning. He's supposed to be up in two hours. He sits down, closes his eyes, leans back in bed. Give him five more minutes, he thinks.

He's blinking and God knows long he's been out. He looks at the clock: 4:20, and Gary's still not back.

"Shit," he whispers. Gary if you fuckin' died in the bathroom..., but the thought makes his blood run cold, and his heart start beating fast, uncomfortably in his chest, and he's on his feet, the room buzzing and fading as the blood drains from his head.

He knocks once and feels like an idiot. He puts his head against the door, but he doesn't hear anything. He twists the knob and it turns in his hand. And he enters afraid of what he'll find. And there's Gary wedged between the toilet and the wall, the window cracked and a cigarette between his fingers. His sleeves are rolled up. Andy stops when he sees the fresh beads of blood oozing around the wads of paper towels that Gary's pushed against his arm. Gary startles violently almost tripping over the toilet, and he pulls down his sleeve with a fast jerky motion. "It's nothing, Andy," he says. "Little stress relief, is all."

Andy shakes his head, but he doesn't' know what to do. Where to grab him. He wants to drag him back to his room. He looks at the razor blade sitting precariously against the porcelain of the sink. Already washed up and clean. But he doesn't know where he can touch Gary: every bit of him a bruise, or cut, or wound threatening to break open.

He's not pissed, he's scared. Gary's always been somehow invulnerable. Resilient. And here there's none of that maniacal veneer left. This is Gary stripped, beaten, and bleeding, and the image of him: this Gary King incongruously overlaps with the one in his mind, and Andy doesn't know what to think, almost as if everything's being pulled out from under him.

"Look, Andy. I'll clean it up." Gary bends down and picks up the bloody tissues dropping them into the toilet, and pulling the chain, like it's nothing. The same as taking a swig of lager, the same as putting a banknote to the table and inhaling deeply. He drops his half-finished cigarette in as well. It sizzles, pops.

It's the first time he realizes just how vulnerable Gary King really is. Something pulls at him, something about the danger and instability that seems to form the core of his best mate, an unpredictability, and he's so bloody hard to read. He's self-destructing, he thinks, and feels the pull to keep him together. To do whatever he can to make Gary King whole again. Because he has to be there. If not for Pete and Steve and Ollie's sake, they all depend on him on some level, but for Andy's, because Gary does something to him he can't explain, and he knows he can't say out loud, but without Gary there everything'd be wrong.

Gary pats him on the shoulder, like he's the one in fucking need of comforting. Those fingernails painted black ghosting against the white pinstripes of Andy's pajamas. And Gary doesn't even bother to kick off his Dr. Martens, just falls into Andy's bed, turning to the side and pulling his knees upwards. His eyes already shut. "You gonna get the light, Andy, or what?"

"Yeah, sure," he hears himself say, his voice distant and tinny like his world, now locked in some metal box, has narrowed just a little bit more, and something in him can't see Gary in the same way.

Something's changed, shifted. He blinks hoping everything will realign and go back to normal. He fumbles for the switch, hits it and eases himself in next to his friend. The streetlight outside his window gives him a shadowed view. He closes his eyes and listens to Gary's breaths, afraid they'll stop. Fucking irrational, he chides himself, but still. He's afraid he's severed something deep in his arm. But the blood had been dark and oozing, slow, almost clotted by the time he stepped in there. Gary'd knew what he was doing. It was something practiced.

What can he even say to him? Gary will clam up. Anything that can threaten his autonomy will be met with derision, cast aside, laughed off. Andy is the only one who knows that Gary King isn't invincible, the only one who ever sees his cracks, as if he's been taken into his confidence, given this knowledge, and yet allowed nothing. It's not going to be that way, not anymore.

"Gary," he says, and he's met with a groan. One of his legs stretches out, but he stills.

"I have to talk to you. Get up." He reaches, goes to grab his shoulders, but then hesitates, remembering how hard he flinched before. In the streetlight, Gary looks small and washed out. The black of his clothing and the darkness of the room sapping what little color is left in his face. The roots of his hair are blond. And the broken illusion envelops Andy, and he's afraid, his heart hammering, a cold sweat forming under the thin layer of his pajamas. And he grabs Gary and gives him a light shake.

"Wha- Jeesus Andy, what is it?" Gary says suddenly sitting up straight. No way he'd been asleep, not with the coke

"Let me see your arm." And Andy reaches out, not asking, and Gary pulls back, almost tumbling from the bed. "Why'd you do it?" Andy says and this time catches him. The cloth is damp, and he can imagine the red seeping through to wet his fingers. Andy stops, just waiting, all of a sudden unsure of what he is doing. Since when was Gary ever this fragile?

Gary takes care of himself, is brave and free, doesn't accept help from others. Fights his own battles, fights their battles, and even as best mates there's always that barrier that exists between them and Gary. Gary is the leader, and a leader has to seem indestructible, somehow a little brighter, and somehow what, less human? A king didn't bleed, Andy thinks, and he almost laughs because how stupid. Here they are almost adults, going on sixteen, and he's had this inkling for the longest time that maybe Gary was the most human of them all. . Running because he felt it all a little too strongly. And that blood, that was running in a way too wasn't it, a stress relief, he'd said. A little escape.

But that relabeling seems slow in his mind, and Gary here continues to shift in form. He's afraid in the morning he'll forget it. Gary will be Gary King, and these thoughts will seem ridiculous, dramatic. To put Gary back together is to humanize him, to change how he's seen his best mate since primary.

In the darkness, somehow, Gary is reduced. In the failing light, it's easy to see: Gary's just Gary. Gary, whose dad hits him. Gary who drinks and does lines of coke. Gary who finds escape in a razor blade. Some poor fifteen going on sixteen year old kid just like the rest of them. Nothing special or grand or magnetic at all. Andy wants his old illusion, and he doesn't. The ambivalence of it curls in his gut and twists, and his fingers loosen.

Gary's half way to the window before Andy can catch him again. And he stands there looking lost, it's a look that Andy can't place, that looks foreign on Gary's clean-shaven face.

"Look, Andy. I just need a place to crash. I'm exhausted, just need a place to sleep. Really it's nothing." And he's never heard his voice like that, and he doesn't know what to do. Should he touch him? Should he block his path. "Gary," he says and feels so stupid, so lost. Gary's not supposed to fall apart. Out of any of them, he's the bastion, he's supposed to keep them together. Some sort of heroic irreverent glue labeled to withstandit all, and when Gary comes apart – Andy doesn't know – in some way so does his world.

So he steps closer, slowly, and he thinks about how Gary himself had approached a stray cat one time, ripped ear, and bleeding, so carefully, and when it looked like everything would be okay the cat had slashed out, tearing three sharp gouges into the palm of Gary's hand. And he's afraid of the reaction he'll get. He sees Gary look to the window from the corner of his eye. Like he's being cornered, and he thinks almost hysterically that Gary's going to hit him or he's going to jump; there's no rational medium.

But it's much quieter than any of that. His fingers close over Gary's wrist, and he doesn't resist this time, and when he looks at him, he looks exhausted, his eyelids droopy and puffy, the area under his eyes purplish and green. The sky behind Gary is starting to shift, the deep cloudless blue giving way to a striated laceration of pink and orange. And he leads him back to the bed and sits him down. And with a little exhausted puff of air Gary pulls back his sleeve revealing the horizontal gash in the middle of his forearm. Like in doing it himself he's still somehow in control. "Really, Andy, no need to be all mother-fucking-hen. It stopped on its own."

"I didn't know, Gary. It freaked me out.

Gary shrugged. "It's not something I do a lot. Just when it gets really bad."

"It was so bad here?"

"Ah, shit no. I didn't mean that. I mean, yeah, the loo in your house in pretty awful and all…, but nah, on the way over- just thinking – I'll do it when I get there. I didn't mean for you to know. I just do it sometimes without thinking, you know? It's a rush." That seems to be it. He doesn't say anything else. His hand hovers over his sleeve, and he raises an eyebrow. "Done playing nurse?"

Andy nods. "Don't do it again." He says, almost tacks on, "okay?" but bites it back. He's serious. Out of all the outrageous things Gary involves him in, some reason this seems the most real, the most grave. Adults get depressed, and bleed themselves out in bathtubs, and he wonders if that's where Gary's mind goes when he has a razor blade in his hand.

"Yes, Mum," Gary says and flops back onto Andy's bed, pulling his sleeve down and looks at the ceiling. Light scatters in strange amorphous blobs against the gray paint. "Want a line before school?" Gary says and laughs and it dies away. "Just a joke. Since when were you such stick in the twat infested mud?"

"Since the biggest twat I know crawled through my window at fucking four in the morning, that's when." Gary laughs and it's infectious. Andy can't help the sad little smile that pulls at the corner of his mouth. And he thinks, it's okay. If Gary didn't fall apart now, the lowest Andy's ever seen him, he won't, ever. And yet, he knows, even as he puts it as far out of mind as he can, that what he saw tonight of Gary will color his impression from then on. Gary's become human.


End file.
